Proton Therapy: A New Cancer Treatment
Put simply, proton therapy promises better outcomes for patients undergoing cancer treatment, with the potential for fewer side effects.
Proton therapy has benefits over conventional therapy in the treatment of many common cancers, such as prostate cancer, cancer in children, lung cancer, cancers of the eye, and many more.
To understand the benefits of this new cancer treatment, it's important to understand how traditional radiation therapy works. A patient who undergoes conventional radiation therapy is exposed to X-rays. As they pass through both healthy and diseased tissue, X-rays leave a track of damage - much like a bullet. This damage can help destroy tumors, but may cause significant harm to surrounding areas. Protons, on the other hand, are more precisely targeted than X-rays. Protons also cause less damage to healthy tissue as they enter the body, and deposit the majority of their destructive energy at the tumor site. Once this energy has been deposited at the tumor site, there is no additional damage to the healthy tissue behind the tumor as there is no exit dose. This phenomenon is called the Bragg peak. As a result, normal, healthy tissue receives less exposure to radiation, resulting in fewer treatment complications. Fewer treatment complications enable our physicians to deliver higher doses of radiation to the tumor. This increased dose improves a patient's probability of a successful outcome.
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